Translated from the Spanish by Katherine SilverNew Directions 2008 | Order

A boozing, sex-obsessed writer finds himself employed by the Catholic Church (an institution he loathes) to proofread a 1,100 page report on
the army's massacre and torture of thousands of indigenous villagers a decade earlier, including the testimonies of the survivors. The
writer's job is to tidy it up: he rants, "that was what my work was all about, cleaning up and giving a manicure to the Catholic hands that
were piously getting ready to squeeze the balls of the military tiger." Mesmerized by the strange Vallejo-like poetry of the Indians' phrases
("the houses they were sad because no people were inside them"), the increasingly agitated and frightened writer is endangered twice over: by
the spell the strangely beautiful heart-rending voices exert over his tenuous sanity, and by real danger -- after all, the murderers are the
very generals who still run this unnamed Latin American country.